Well, you can always have repairs blocking the cycleway-side of a shared-use path over several months. That doesn’t make it a footway. Designation is about laws and signage, but not about usability. Which is exactly why these 2 things should be separated, or as @Tolstoi21 said:
=designated precisely provides a third option between the two.
The question is, and that’s what @Tolstoi21 says as well, what exactly means “designated” for OSM, and why would we want to capture it? And the simple answer is: ask 2 mappers, and you will get 10 answers.
In the Freedom to Roam world, one can walk and bicycle almost everywhere. Specifically, anything that we would tag with highway=path legally implies bothfoot=yes and bicycle=yes. I.e.: one cannot legally restrict bicycling on pathways (except in some very rare and specific cases).
no, this depends on the jurisdiction, e.g. in Germany you can walk everywhere (path or no path at all, private or public land, fields or forest, it doesn’t matter, with a few exceptions like some nature reserves where you have to keep on the ways, or tilled fields), but you can only legally cycle on some paths, cycling and walking is treated very differently
If you mean designation=, the point of the tag is to record the official status of the object.
The fact that a given path in the UK is a public bridleway is an observable fact and is worth recording in itself, so we record it with designation=public_bridleway.
Having read the post in the other topic, I can only guess, that for you foot=designated is not an access tag at all. It instead maps a promise, that the path gets maintained, e.g. snowploughed in winter, and a hint that it should be given some preference by walkers; manifested by on site signage.
Yes, hence my point about the false dichotomy between access tags and descriptive tags. The designated tag provides a further distinction between the two. Of course, =designated itself implies a =yes access value, but encodes also other information beside it not easily expressible by other tags (at least modulo the Finnish and Nordic FtR laws), and its application has objective criteria, i.e. signage.
Which is why I prefaced that paragraph with “In the Freedom to Roam world…”, though given @dieterdreist s reaction, I should have written ‘in counties where the Nordic style FtR laws rule’. Most of the other general statements in this thread deserve a similar caveat, though.
Just to clarify, I think you’re saying that the path is unusable for cycling by the general public, not that it is completely unusable by anyone. It would by usable by military members authorized to be in the area, right? Apologies if I’ve misinterpreted.
Access tagging for a way like this should be bicycle=private + foot=private to indicate that only certain authorized people (military) may walk or cycle there. But then it is not possible to also tag bicycle=designated + foot=designated to indicate that for the people allowed in the military area it is a designated path for walking and cycling. Hence the need for different tags to specify what a way is designated for, separate from access tags.
In some housing areas in my neighbourhood, there are ways, maybe even true to the Wiki designated specification, the residents and their guests are welcome. Signs prohibit access to strangers though, so they are not foot=yes. Aren’t those footways?
As far as I understood, the extra is mostly concerned with usability. And that brings us back to the start again.
there is no relationship between maintenance and “designated”, whether a path is snowploughed in winter depends on many factors, and while we do not map these reasons, there are tags to map the effects (e.g. winter_service=yes/no, salting, gritting). There is also no guarantee that a way with such a sign like a footway designation, is in a good maintenance state, or that it has a paved surface (while these may be seen as implied in some areas, the actual requirement is a sign (or other kind of legal designation), not the physical appearance).
Exactly! I’d also argue that there is an intelligible (and objectively differentiable)—albeit perhaps slight—difference between the two.
Well, please allow me to retort! Take the case of the Central Park in Helsinki. Here’s a link to a map of the routes that are winter maintained by the Urban Environment Division. You’ll notice that none of the paths in the park are officially maintained during the winter. Here’s a link to a map of paths that are winter maintained in the Park by the Culture and Leisure Division. Finally, here’s a map of routes that get turned into ski-routes in winters that have enough snowfall. Comparing those two maps, you’ll notice that there are both winter-maintained paths and ski-routes in the Park. By examining e.g. Mapillary, you’ll see, that paths that have the roundel-type signage, or cycle-route-signage are maintained even in winters, but paths that have only footway-route-signage (see e.g. the brown sign here with only a pedestrian in the sign) are turned into ski-routes.
Which is absolutely also true of the roundel-type (normative) signs. At least here in Finland. I have no idea what the case might be in Germany and therefore will refrain from commenting on that.
Not long ago someone mentioned in another thread that while all motorways and trunk highways in Europe and North America are paved (with asphalt or concrete), in parts of Africa many are nonpaved. It is almost impossible to make worldwide assumptions for specific features on most of the top-level tags.
Mapillary, you’ll see, that paths that have the roundel-type signage, or cycle-route-signage are maintained even in winters, but paths that have only footway-route-signage (see e.g. the brown sign here with only a pedestrian in the sign) are turned into ski-routes.
Not particularly - that would typically just be mapped as highway=cycleway (or sometimes highway=footway, bicycle=yes if it’s not really constructed to cycleway standards and the local council has just put a sign up on an existing footpath).
It doesn’t seem to be used very consistently. Just yesterday I cycled past a sign like that next to the writing “cyclists, give priority to pedestrians”, on what had clearly been built as a footway. (Already mapped highway=footway bicycle=yes)
… I’d probably also add segregated=no as well, or =yes for the equivalent “side by side” sign. It’s unrelated to designation. Here is something with a legal right of access on foot (but not on bycycle) but has been constructed to a standard suitable for use by pedestrians and cyclists. To be clear - cyclists are permitted to use it in its current form, but the owner of the land (here the local council, I think) could prevent their access tomorrow if they wanted to. They couldn’t do that with pedestrians.
You were claiming that “there is no relationship between maintenance and ‘designated’”. I provided a counterexample.
I don’t question that there are lots of maintained designated footways and cycleways, but the fact they are designated cycleways is not a guarantee they provide a smooth surface or are otherwise well maintained.
